• My goal is a thousand words. If I write more, sweet, but I have to have that much at least or my day is wasted.

  • That's the beauty of self-publishing, I think. Sometimes you just want to tell the story the way you want to tell it and things like word limits can really inhibit you.

    Sherrilyn Kenyon had to go with a completely different publisher because she really likes writing long stories, and her League Series tended to intimidate the publisher of her other books.

    Neil Gaiman's preferred text version of American Gods is allegedly 12,000 words longer than the originally released version.

    There are definitely unnecessary words and pruning is always essential, but otherwise, I just don't let it bother me.

    The reason I went with novellas instead of longer pieces was because I also didn't want to needlessly expand on a story. Originally the first book was only going to be a short story, and it ran up to about 20,000 words or so. The second book came out to around 40,000. But I was happy with the story I had told in each of them.

    Now my big struggle is what to do about the third book in the series. I don't want my character to keep encountering murders, because in my ego-driven vision of the future where I still have readers a century from now, I don't want people to be asking the same questions about him as they now ask about Miss Marple; namely, "Why don't they ever suspect her?"

  • My name is Nathanielle. I've been writing my whole life, pretty much since I was five. Obviously I've improved a teensy bit since then.

    I could never narrow down on one genre. I've written science fiction, fantasy, and stories that probably have no specific genre, but I wrote them anyway because if I did anything else with the ideas in my head, I'd likely go to prison.

    Recently I've been working on two blogs. I also self-published two novellas in the mystery/amateur sleuth genre.

  • I think it's a new enough social media that people will be reluctant to try it. Who knows.

  • Asperger's here.

  • I've been going to a website for premade covers, so I assume the artists know what they're doing.

  • Fortunately, I've never needed their services.

  • I think MAD Magazine said it perfectly. It's hard to put any faith in a company that can't stick with one campaign. On the other hand, I have to give them credit for coming up with so many long running concepts.

    The Cavemen one was probably the first time I could ever call a commercial "high concept". And I remember being doubtful when I found that they were going to turn it into an actual television series, but from what I understand it wasn't as bad as people thought it would be.

  • I'm in that boat myself. I'm not exactly friends with this author, but answered a question she posted on her Facebook page and she liked my reply so much that I won a free copy of her book.

    Then I read it and it was like, oh good Lord, I'm so glad I didn't pay for that.

    But I don't know if I'll ever have the strength to review her book, so the best thing I can do is hope that no one plunks down cash for it.

  • The whole Caveman series of commercials from Geico.